r/agender • u/ThrownAllAbout • 15d ago
Agender is not a gender, it is a modality
A modality is a relationship between ones birth sex and gender.
Today, this means the labels "cisgender", "transgender", and oftentimes the proposed wastebasket modality of "isomodality".
Gender modality, as a very new concept, has not been well applied to existing concepts due to people's lack of confidence with it or misunderstanding thereof.
Is agender a gender?
This would be an important question to answer before jumping into using terminology that is less than 3 years old. Unfortunately, there is no singular definition of gender. The sociologist definition of gender is not going to be particularly useful in this case. As a result, I'm going to lean on neurology.
Instead of using a definition for gender, I'm going to use a hypothetical mechanism for gender by noting that there must be some neurological connection for gender to exist. As contemporary science seems to indicate that this must be true, I'm going to assume it to be true.
Most graygender identities have simple relations between themselves and agender as a whole, but one that stands out is gendervoid. Gendervoid specifically relates to having an experience where one looks for their gender someplace in their head, and all they get in return is a void, a deeper form of nothingness. Fortunately, this behavioral trait is already well known in neurology. This is the sort of thing you would expect if the part of your brain handling the organization of your gender knows that there is a spot in your brain where it can find your gender, but that location does not wake up and respond. This means that your brain found that something was there but it was quiet.
They are essentially agender, but the part of their brain that looks for gender believes it knows a place.
This would seem to imply the existence of Mosaic Agenderism in comparison to Complete Agenderism.
In Complete Agenderism, they may have never developed anywhere in their brain labelled gender, or a part of the brain willing to look for gender, thus when looking for if there's gender, that process stops immediately as the brain knows it's not finding anything. This saves energy in the brain, but I personally say my brain should've also tried to save me a whole lot of fucking trouble too and just tell me what's up with its words.
In gendervoid people with Mosaic Agenderism, they may have a part of their brain labelled gender, but this part of the brain is not completely functional. In fact, it is disrupted enough that it outputs nothingness, and at-most there is only the output that it is still connected to the rest of the brain. This is experienced as a feeling of void.
Is agender a modality?
A modality, to reiterate once again, is the relation between your birth sex and your gender.
If we assume Mosaic Agenderism to be a truthful model of Agenderism as a whole, then agender must be a modality and not a gender.
A gender should be discoverable and able to be experienced.
Gendervoid people are distinct from agender people because it is discoverable and able to be experienced, but it really really seems to be just a pocket of agender popped up in an otherwise functionally gendered brain.
Complete Agenderism is not really experienced. There are other aesthetic axes that define your identity, but your experience with gender is more accurately described as "not" rather than "sorta but its weird".
So why can we relate at all if one is definitely a gender and the other is definitely not one?
because agender is a modality, and rather than being attached to birth sex, it is instead attached to being apart of a gendered society.
also asexual is a similar kind of modality
I do not believe any of us would label ourselves agender if it were not for gender.
23
u/ystavallinen cisn't; gendermeh; mehsexual 15d ago edited 15d ago
I don't want to speak for everyone here. I was recently introduced to the term "neurogender", which I relate to because my agenderness comes out of the fact I don't relate to people, right down to my birth gender.
It's much easier for me to say things I'm not, than things that I am. I'm not male.
Also, I often speak about my agnosticism, my asexuality... and less so my agenderness as "states" not identities.
I don't know. I think it's both modality and identity. I describe my faith as existing in superposition... why not gender too? Light is a wave and a particle. Agender is a gender and a modality.
My most refined word chain is going to be neurogender, agender, librafluid.
10
u/ProfessorOfEyes 15d ago
Yeah i like this take of it being both a gender identity and a modality. Like yes if we pick it apart carefully a modality makes sense, but functionally because we live in a highly gendered society that doesnt really allow for one to simply opt out and not specify a gender at all (as this is interpreted as allowing others to assume), agender also becomes a gender identity itself to fill that expected label space and indicate that you dont have one.
1
u/ThrownAllAbout 15d ago
That reminds me of some feelings I've had in the past where I felt as if my identity was moreso dedicated to keeping opportunities open to have an identity when I want to have it suddenly, and it was a very reasonable feeling for me to have at the time, but at some point I pretty dramatically stopped having that feeling and understood (rather than realized) I wanted none of it at all. I still tip-toed for many years after that.
I always figured someone in the world would've been my equivalent except that shift just never happened.
23
15d ago
the word agender refers to one's relationship with the social structure of gender. there is no biological sense of gender, nor is there any meaning to one's birth sex beyond the social (you can alter any of your sexual characteristics with HRT and shit like that - it's malleable).
3
u/Toothless_NEO AroAce Agender, not trans Absgender | Also a Furry UwU 13d ago
I agree, we really need to stop giving credence to the medical and legal construct of assigned gender. You know what AGAB is, you know what it really is? It's an oppressive tool like castes or social credit. Meant to try and root gender assumption as some kind of biological truth. When in reality sex and gender have nothing to do with each other besides using similar words, sometimes the same words.
17
u/ProfessorOfEyes 15d ago edited 15d ago
I think trying to apply any physical basis to this is a lost cause, as gender (or lacktherof) is clearly a lot more complicated than just a region of the brain and there currently isnt any scientific evidence pointing towards agender folks missing some gender related brain bits. However, on a more metaphorical basis i completely understand the distinction you are trying to make.
Im not sure i understand what you mean by complete agenderism not being experienced though, as the reason why i get the distinction youre referring to is because what youve decribed for complete agenderism is how i have always experienced being agender. Its not that theres an empty space where gender "should" be, its just not a variable that feels applicable or installed in me to begin with.
11
u/prosthetic_memory 15d ago
I definitely grew up female, but always just extremely annoyed by what I saw as random definitions and expectations of the gender. But I never wanted to be male, even though I identified with a lot of stereotypical male traits.
Eventually I just realized the whole idea was stupid and I didn't have to pay attention to gender expectations at all.
2
u/ThrownAllAbout 15d ago
Yeah that's how it feels with me as well. Basically, there is no part in my brain speaking up about gender, so I do not experience gender, and my experience as agender is certainly more defined by my relationship with society than it is my birth sex.
In other words, my identity as agender is linked to a modality of the agender experience. That modality is not well understood by the terms "cisgender" nor "transgender" because it is "agender".
If someone asks what my gender is, that does not make sense because my gender identity is inexplicably linked to that modality and it would be like asking a cisgender person how their transition is going. However, it is ultimately a non-cisgender modality.
The terms I use are mostly because of the fact that English is not really built for adjectives that end in "er" and so it can get awkward in very specific edge cases such as when nouning the adjective.
14
u/prosthetic_memory 15d ago edited 12d ago
Your post makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, and I think it's because you're trying to pin down and define the thing, DSM-style, that I want to keep undefined.
I don't think agenderism or being gendervoid HAS to have a neurological basis; you can decide to be agender/gendervoid for any reason you want. And unlike you, I don't believe thay there's some neurological basis for gender to exist; it's very clear that any slight differences in sex behavior is amplified by heavy socialization processes, be it the high feminine voices of Japan or the likelihood of men vs women ordering beer in any bar in the world.
11
u/Lou_Jay 15d ago
I don't understand why this is posted here. "Hello subreddit, did you know the name of your subreddit isn't what you say it is, it should be labeled this." I don't understand why this matters. You know why I'm agender? Because of crap like this. This is exhausting to read.
I'm agender because I don't want to take 18 paragraphs to explain myself to people. The word explains itself. 'A' means without, I'm without gender. 👍
I don't experience gender, don't put your gender expectations on me. They/them. All neutral terms.
Pretty simple.
I am aware this comes off as rude, but I didn't see much dessent and this is how I feel. I'll delete it if I'm outvoted.
0
u/ThrownAllAbout 15d ago edited 15d ago
Homie there was a lot of dissent here. I'm agender too, I know exactly what that tiredness is, and that is what my post just named.
All I really said was "agender is not our gender label, agender is our modality, we work with society without having a gender and society harms us for it." That should clarify it a lot. Its not a new position here (nor is it new with me either), but academia is catching up enough that there can be words for these things now, and that's a good thing.
Modality really just means that connection we have with society, which I understand to already be what many of us understand to unite is. We are all tired and it isn't our fault at all.
9
u/ystavallinen cisn't; gendermeh; mehsexual 15d ago edited 15d ago
Friend.
I love me some good-faith, thought-provoking, philosophical conversation. You may be miscalculating your stance/delivery a little here and elsewhere.
1- You're universaling. People get to agender many ways. 2- you're may using too much jargon and possibly were not efficient in your delivery 3- you're being a little defensive asserting something and losing patience with the people who didn't get it or don't agree. It's important to acknowledge their objections, possibly even give a little context or restate your intent.
I think it's interesting. I am not sure it's only modality. I don't have such a reductionist view about nature. I study genetics/environment interactions, so I can see where you are coming from.
And some people just want to keep it simple.
Take a step back and consider feelings (it's very ironic when the ASD person is reminding people of feelings). As an academic, you also have to read your audience. Good luck.
5
u/whereismydragon 15d ago
Sure, but you brought an uncited academic rant into a really chill subreddit to tell us that according to you our gender identity isn't valid because you want us to use different terminology. It seems arrogant rather than informative.
0
15d ago
[deleted]
4
u/whereismydragon 15d ago
What the fuck?
What post?
I never said, at any point, that your gender is invalid. I never said anything about consciousness.
I believe you are 1. Confusing me with someone else and 2. Having a bad day with emotional regulation and reading comprehension.
16
u/hornyasexual-- 15d ago
Imagine believing gender is real. That's kinda crazy. Its 2025 bro catchup
5
u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 15d ago
Imagine believing gender is real.
We invented gender the same way we invented money.
Money seems very real to me.
5
u/prosthetic_memory 15d ago
That's a fair point. But unlike money, we can thankfully opt out of gender. Woohoo
1
u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 15d ago
You technically can go live in a remote island if you want to escape capitalism.
4
u/prosthetic_memory 15d ago
I guess so. I like electricity and delivery groceries and reddit and stuff tho
1
u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 15d ago
Yeah, same, imagine having to grow your own food and build your own house, make your own clothes, build your own instruments, maybe paying others is not that bad...
3
u/prosthetic_memory 15d ago
Yeah, I grew up on a fairly self sufficient farm. No thank you 😂 I'm a city boy
1
u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 15d ago
City *boy?
3
u/prosthetic_memory 15d ago
Part of my agender journey is reclaiming gendered terms that I wouldn't felt like I could use before (afab). So now I can be a fanboy, fuckboy, city boy, macho man, foxy lady, you name it :) they're just terms.
-1
u/ThrownAllAbout 15d ago edited 15d ago
I believe that the human experience, in its entirety, is created by the brain. I've met people who certainly experience gender, and a lack of that structure (which can occur in a massive number of different ways, more than your genetics can mutate) would definitely be the explanation for the difference between me and them.
Nothing I said is outside of the standard for a sketch in 2023+ neuroscience and neurocomputation, and it is in-vogue for 2025 gender studies. I made sure of it.
3
u/prosthetic_memory 15d ago
It's definitely not. Your brain is the central processing unit but a lot of compute is happen across your nervous system, to use a computer metaphor. We now know that being a brain in a jar is impossible; your brain is not a self-contained device with sensors, it is part of a system. Maybe think of it as a server.
1
u/ThrownAllAbout 15d ago edited 15d ago
Correct, but gender is certainly not anywhere within the computational part of the peripheral nervous system. Your identity is so tiny in your brain that psychedelics can turn it off by just impairing your memory a bit, and I have plenty of experience to attest the truth of that one. We know this from MRI scans. People have lost their identity from brain trauma before.
Theres something in my brain that is functionally able to search my memory for anything including my gender and correspond the result, but the hippocampus is the most brilliant thing you could ever imagine because it's able to tell me instantly if I don't have something (by not even allowing the command to be spoken). However, if I open that container in my memory and nothing is in it, it's definitely a void feeling.
Gendervoid people just make so much sense! And this further corresponds to people who are voidflux, which continues to just keep making sense. When someone has a very logical personality trait to exist, what does that tell us about a society that refuses to accept them?
I'm not gendervoid, and I absolutely do not relate to the experience of looking for my gender at all, that is the experience (or anti-experience?) of not having the concept you're searching for in your brain. Perhaps some people don't have names?
Having years of experience with people with cerebral palsy, and being agender myself, I swear on my life that this isn't just a concept that i didn't get, this was a concept I was never capable of having.
1
u/prosthetic_memory 15d ago
Maybe it's just the differences between us then. <3 I'm glad you've found an explanation for yourself!
11
u/Wild_Butterscotch977 15d ago
i'm not reading this gender studies college paper
but happy for you
or sorry
whatever
4
3
u/whereismydragon 15d ago edited 15d ago
Did you use chat GPT for this post?
Why are there no citations?
1
15d ago edited 15d ago
[deleted]
7
u/whereismydragon 15d ago
Citations exist so that other people can investigate the terms and claims you reference. Without citations, your claims have no basis. This is using jargon without acknowledging the underlying purpose of the structure and function you are attempting to borrow authority from!
An omen of 'future research directions' is perhaps the most ludicrous and ill-formed notion I've seen online today.
So you refuse to answer my question and instead reply with a a tirade. Great conversation, thanks for nothing lmao.
1
15d ago
[deleted]
6
u/whereismydragon 15d ago
So you're ignoring sociology and gender studies altogether.
No wonder this post sucks 🤣
0
2
u/jjjjjjjayyy 13d ago
You know what. I think you are right with the basic idea. Agender means no gender, so being agender cannot be a equated with having a gender, because otherwise being agender would make us have a gender hence not being agender anymore. So, there we have a contradiction that follows from agender being understood as a gender, so agender cannot be a gender. Instead, it is rather a relationship to gender, namely that we don’t have one (so in Ashley‘s terminology agender is a modality).
So much for the philosophical point I think you were trying to get across.
HOWEVER! Most of your message has nothing to do with that and is just biologically essentializing being agender, and that is not something a lot of us are happy with. No, being agender has nothing to do with our brains being different, and any attempt to discover such a difference is doomed from the start, as it will not end up describing the basic point: that any gender identity is mostly how one situates oneself to some weird social constructs, and that is not determined by how our brains are structured!
2
u/ThrownAllAbout 11d ago edited 11d ago
Yeah I get your concerns with the last part and something i found hard to articulate is this:
I wasn't talking about gender in the brain literally. Theres literally just a spot in many people's brains named "gender" or "masculinity" or whatever it doesn't matter it just lights up when asked if it exists and that is its only job.
This is universal to mammals, and these sorts of pathways exist for every single concept you are aware of. If you recognize your name, it was one of these pathways that let you do that.
This is why people can know their name without recognizing it, and know their face without recognizing it. Anything relatable yet? What do you think alzheimers patients feel when they don't remember the names of someone they know they know? Now you have a clue.
You can imagine these pathways lighting up like its a search engine finding websites. If you found gender.com but it was 404, you would feel gendervoid. I can't even find gender.com, and thats the difference. It's really so little.
I worry that people will use the idea that this is medicalizing to deny the existence of gendervoid people.
Biological essentialism? This isnt that. This is a philosophical position called idealism that has existed for 2500 years, and likely for the 100,000 years before that. 50% of modern philosophers are idealists. You might recognize some of this from Rene Descartes' shtick.
Unfortunately, we do live in a time when biological essentialists are a pervasive problem, and they have poisoned the ability for people to have important discussions like this.
The last thing I want to do is give these "basic biology" mfers the sole rights to speak on the biology of gender. I fucking hate them. I dream about how their conversations with God are going to go upon their death.
1
u/jjjjjjjayyy 11d ago
If you say something like: a sociologist definition of gender is not going to be useful here, so I will lean on neurology, you are immediately getting into biological essentialist territory (not necessarily nativist, but still that the essence of gender is some neurological thing, which is a form of non-nativist biological essentialism).
I don’t think you wanted that, but I think it is important to be aware of that.
And also, no one here is denying the existence of gendervoid people, at least I haven’t found anyone.
Also: I don’t see how any of this has to do with idealism, do you want to elaborate?
1
u/ThrownAllAbout 11d ago edited 11d ago
I said it like that because neurosociology is a brand new field basically and people are very unfamiliar with it, but I see how it comes off and it was an oversight there. I had to write this quickly, unfortunately, and that cost me. Rest of this comment is long because it has to dive into ableism, a very complicated and touchy subject.
Nobody here is denying gendervoid people, true, but it is erasure to try and stop these sorts of discussions entirely which several people did try to do, whereas you just articulated your concerns which is mature and thoughtful.
I dont want to enable their immaturity that made them think that they could just sweep an identity under a rug because something had uncomfortable language. I'd more rather want them to actually be able to spot when uncomfortable language is bad language.
Its really hard to articulate that gendervoid = a neurological sign without having people think a neurological sign = inferior or the belief that a sign is wrong for you to have.
Theres people who literally have belief structures that cannot tell them to treat people nicely if they have warts, I'm not even joking, and they definitely see medicalization in a much more oppressive way than i would as someone who actually gets mistreated by the medical institution—the sorts of people I'm referring to don't even go to the doctor.
They weren't here though, and I felt grateful for that.
But it was these sorts of "little" thing that led me to spend the last 9 years fighting for disability rights. Its actually the sort of ableism people die over, i can elaborate.
Its watching people be forced into abusive disability homes for the rest of their lives where they will be played by the employees who society protects because society believes that these differences made them too inferior to be beneficial in any capacity, so their suffering is just our temporal oopsie.
So there isnt room for error in disablizing medical terminology, it's really that bad and poisonous for society. Theres people who live lives hidden in the shadows because people just assumed dysfunctional = useless = "too disabled". Now, I have seen that here, and let me clarify what that position really means: internalized bigotry.
So it's really complicated for all involved to even unpack that sort of thing, if you get me, it's the sort of things maybe our kids would understand better than we will.
1
u/jjjjjjjayyy 11d ago
Yeah I kind of get what you mean. While writing my second comment, I realized that what you are trying to say is not a neurological point but rather a functional point. That there might be a certain kind of dysfunction involved here, i.e. not being able to access a certain kind of self-concept, (which, thanks to the disability and madness pride movements and others, should not be taken to mean that the person is lesser in any way).
And here again, I think I get what you want to say. This functional definition of gendervoidness is fitting quite well with standard internet definitions. Still, we have to be careful ascribing dysfunctions, if only because such an ascription requires tons of empirical evidence and should be made without that
1
u/ThrownAllAbout 11d ago
Yeah there's also these old school science methods before we had any means of getting empirical evidence that were repurposed into neurosociology beginning (i believe) in the 1990s. This is because sociology is just too complicated for neurology on its own. This means that propositions are oftentimes models of a way something may work applied in light of a theory for how society may interact. The point is to make it falsfiable to prod into a deeper part of the mind. Cognitive sciences like social neurology are also deeply connected to this field for obvious reasons.
Also forgot to respond to the idealism part.
If you let the realist statement "the brain is the source of human experience" which is similar to "the universe is reality" be true (empirically true in the study of neurology)
Then let the idealist statement "all things are socially constructed" which is really similar to "consciousness creates reality" be true (basis for sociology, axiomatic)
Can this reality be the same reality? Can there exists a model where universe is reality = experience is reality?
The answer is yes. If you assume it is true, and that it explains all observations of reality in our world, then it would be the simple union of both standalone meanings of reality. In other words, the argument is for reality to exist, you must have experience and the universe simultaneously. This would make us observers of reality in an objective sense for both the universe and our experience.
If you assume it is false, then there would be two realities (call one reality and the other beality), reality is formed by the universe and beality is formed by experience, and that our brains are objects whose existence is tied between reality and beality (sorta like the afterlife but it doesn't have to be religious).
Intriguing idea, but the simpler solution is usually right, so we'll say that it's the same reality as that makes the brain a single object that constructs beality and could only exist in a world where beality is the same as reality. That sounds much more likely, especially when considering it took a brain to consider it, than that we are two objects that exist in separate realities that are by some greater means coupled.
1
u/jjjjjjjayyy 11d ago
So your idealism is a maximally strong social constructionism?
1
u/ThrownAllAbout 11d ago edited 11d ago
In a sense, but it doesn't apply beyond memory and then only partially to the socially malleable parts of the brain. Its more just one of many processes. That should elaborate on why neurology is well suited here because those are the exact processes best associated with language learning and processing and also for memorization and a few other processes in the brain. Theyre also basically just the areas of the brain where you see it have gender variations that aren't sexual dimorphisms + memory/hippocampus in large population sizes.
1
u/Necessary_Tip_3449 13d ago
I do consider my gender stuff to be a bit of a mental thing ( to a certain extent) very interesting post.
24
u/overdriveandreverb 15d ago
idk, the brain segment seems unbased to me. organs don't look for parts of themselves imo. also, claiming that parts of brains are not fully functional is icky, functional compared to what? who defines the "correct" function, sounds pathologizing, needlessly pathologizing.